ShopGoodwill

I have bought a lot of wonderful things from Shopgoodwill! Last week I bought a SMC Takumar 135mm v 2

So the first thing to say here is I would not consider most of the negative reviews here to be of much use. Most of these reviews come from "pickers" who make a living buying things from goodwill (the charity) on the cheap and then reselling them for a profit. They used to do this at the local good will store, but Goodwill got smarter and decided to cut them out completely and put the Items up for bid to a large audience of experts who could more accurately price an item based on its worth. It is exactly the same way E-bay works. The larger the competitive bidder pool and audience, the better chance somebody bidding knows what something is worth and will push the price up close to the actual market price. Pickers for YEARS made their livings exploiting the fact that a local goodwill had no inherent knowledge of antiques or other things so to move stuff they priced it low as a guess. So all of the moaning and complaints here is mostly coming from these pickers and collectors who suddenly now have to pay market price for something and can no longer make easy profits fleecing a local charity for their own personal gain. Sorry guys, the internet gets rid of middlemen (YOU). Get over it. Find a new scam. As a long time customer of the goodwill auctions site I have found them to be fairly good. Most of the complaints here about shipping are off base too as shipping costs have risen. A LOT in the last few years. And they also have to pay for the box, packing materials, and an employees time to box and ship things. I don't find the price unreasonable or much different than I pay to ship similar items on Ebay. The only real gripe I have with them is how SLOW they are to ship things. Some times after buying It can take up to a week for them to even print the shipping label, and then another week for them to box something up, and then 3 more days for it to get dropped off at fedex or USPS. This is really the only thing I think they could improve on is a commitment to faster shipping of paid items. Seriously. It should not take a month for me to get my paid merchandise. That is ridiculous.

I recently started shopping online with Good Will within the past 6 months and I've gotten pretty good deals on a lot of things so far. Most of the time, I find pretty interesting things. I've gotten very good condition shoes, an brand new comforter set, even a snowboard.

CONS:
- A lot of things are pretty used and I don't think they should be selling for the price they are... with the added shipping costs, sometimes those used items can amount to more than the actual item bought new in stores. It's pretty ridiculous considering these items were donated at no cost, but I'm just hoping that Good Will really does use the profits for charity.
- Another thing I do not like is that, sometimes they list the minimum bid price for you to bid, but it's already been bidded at a higher price, and by the time you place your minimum bid, it's already at a higher not-shown price, and that can cause a delay for you to re-input an amount, load the screen and lose the auction.
- Very hard searching for specific items because they are not always properly titled.
- The description of the items are pretty vague, and you might end up with something that does not work or have all the pieces.

PROS:
- You can find a lot of name brand and high-end items in very good condition, without the retail price tag.
- A lot of items can be found brand new, with tags or in their packaging
- 1 cent shipping on a lot of items
- Pretty fast shipping in my experiences
- Less time consuming than actually going out to the Good Will stores and digging through everything (unless you have time and you're into that)
- They give you a good deal of time to pay for the item, once you've won the auction. (Keep in mind, too many unpaid items will result in you not being able to continue placing bids)
- Giving back to charity while saving money is always a plus right?

All in all, buying things from the website has been pretty positive. You must know what you're really buying before you place the bid and should always calculate the shipping to see if it's worth it. The feeling of winning an auction is fun, especially when you're sitting behind the screen and no one can be mad at you. Have fun!

If you want to buy something and the auction ends on a weekend or a holiday, and because they DO NOT answer questions on that weekend, and you take a chance and buy it, because you dont really know the condition, or if it is a collectible radio, and you need a certain part off of the radio, DO YOU take the chance and buy it? And if you do buy it, and it does NOT HAVE the part you needed when you receive it... DO YOU GET YOUR MONEY BACK? In other words if you cant get answers to questions that 100% you need an answer for... and buy it... will they refund your money because of this?
I have been in this situation in the last 3 months, and NO lie, have not gotten an answer for at least 20 times... I repair vintage radios and this site has a lot of radios I need, weather to fix it up or for parts... but because the shipping and handling is way out of control, I just cant bid on something that IS NOT going to do me any good... And I know for a fact that once an item has sold, forget about seeing or finding another one...

Why do they inflate shipping... this was my email to customer service... I contacted the seller asked about combined shipping, they stated they could combine the two items I was interested in, I asked for a combined invoice, they sent a combined invoice with no discount on shipping, I reached out to them again they lowered the shipping cost by 2.36.
In my opinion only... and I am wrong alot... as a seller and consumer I feel that... well for example on eBay sellers inflate their shipping costs to avoid paying eBay fees... that's why you used to see a 20 dollar item selling for one dollar with 19 dollars shipping... the seller only had to pay the eBay %on 1.00, eBay stopped this but as a buyer it was infuriating but understandable... for private eBay sellers... even public eBay sellers. Even when Goodwill is selling on eBay... when Goodwill shops are doing the same thing... on Goodwill site... with no eBay fees..., it's giving your brand a bad name. That there is something shady with the charity in general because as a consumer I think to myself, what reason could they have to lie about the shipping costs. So maybe all the sales money goes one place and then the shipping costs are sent back to the stores and for some reason that I can't see as innocent, the individual stores want to have more than what they pay to ship... not only did they charge 10 dollars over the price to ship... they charged an additional 8 dollars in handling. Using priority mail... the box is free. So staff and bubble wrap and tape.
I am just giving my opinion. And don't expect you to refund or attempt to help in my specific situation. I should not have bought without asking for what the combined shipping would be. But I have a slight impulse shopping issue...
I hope your day is awesome... and that if you have the ability to implement a structural shipping ruberic for all online sales. It would give all of your buyers more confidence in there shopping... in impulse bidding... in your brand which I believe has an awesome mission...

Jelly

I bid and won 3 different sewing machines, first one they put one sheet of bubble wrap and you guess what a 40lb vintage machine looked like when it got here, but goodwill refunded my money so I was disappointed but happy. Recently I found two different models, first one I got arrived perfectly packaged and well cushioned (I asked before hand), second one I should've done my research, the reviews on that model were not good...I do think shopgoodwill doesn't describe if item works or not.when it says powers on...don't think it works because I found out why touch and sew sewing machines are called touch and throw. It did not work and I'm pretty good fixing them but in the ad, the pic showed a light on.powers on when I got the machine the bulb inside it was burnt out so either they knowingly misled by just turning it on with a different bulb and saying it powers on...knowing it doesn't work and taking out a working lightbulb or they didn't know if it worked.The machine looks great but it's not. I realize things are as.is. But things should at least be tested to see if they run or not, at least in store you can plug an item in and test yourself. Buy at your own risk but I feel cheated on this machine, after I bid I saw bad reviews...lesson learned. The other machine I got unstuck and seems to be coming along, it looks like this one will work.just do your homework before bidding on an item. I agree with others that said the shipping is too expensive. Goodwill has gone up on their prices alot.used to be more affordable...they are selling used items for goodness sake! I've really cut back on what I purchase there because of the high prices.

-Price. Every other resale platform is cheaper now on the items themselves AND the crazy-high shipping costs (just saw $20 shipping for a women's small box-store t-shirt with a SG price of $8 on a 7-day auction listing... the shirt itself probably cost $6 retail). But together, Shopgoodwill is at least twice as much as the other platforms or local consignment shops.
-Non-descriptions. Besides the really poor photos at SG, there is no description of the item or its current condition. Many times, the lister has no idea what the item is, its age (there are currently 50-60 year old items of used clothing listed there), any mention of the visable holes/snags/stains/wear.
-Shipping. If in the case you do decide to buy an item, even with the premium shipping costs, many of these stores will not be shipping your item for about a week - then add on ~4 days beyond that for arrival. I have had a few boxes to be missing items paid for, so watch that too.
-Site issues. They have just implemented a new online system that is not working well. Issues still ongoing - 1) very slow page loading times that cause the system to repeatedly time out especially during the evening prime time hours 2) sign in problems & issues with the site signing off active customers 3) Auctions that were won, but the item does not go to the check-out queue. The transaction gets lost somewhere. The store can't help & neither does customer service. 4) The sizes of all the thousands of clothing items are almost all truncated from the search-results thumbnails because of system miscalculations. So, they still leave it to the customer to do too much work to sort through a haystack to try to find their size. That, with a major increase in prices is going to turn away a whole lot of potential sales.